THE PINKIE (Japan, 2014)
Director: Lisa Takeba 
Starring: Ryota Ozawa, Miwako Wagatsuma, Haruka Suenaga, Reon Kadena, Takashi Nishina, Mondo Yamagishi, Kanji Tsuda

Winner of the Grand Prix at the 24th Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival, Lisa Takeba’s debut feature is a hyper-imaginative crazytown sci-fi drama about a slacker and his clone. Flashy, funky, and filled to the brim with genre influences of all kinds, The Pinkie is a uniquely entertaining comedy moving at breakneck speed with a plot that seems to be lifted straight out of another solar system. Ryosuke is drifting through life, but when he seduces a yakuza’s mistress, the gangsters rough him up and chop off his pinkie. It comes into the possession of Momoko, a girl who has been stalking Ryosuke. She gets herself a cloning kit and grows her own Ryosuke-clone. The creature performs beyond expectations and proves to be a remarkable lover. Soon, hilarity and horror are sharing the same seat. Chock-full of Western and Japanese pop-culture references and packed with jokes ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous, it’s as if Gen Sekiguchi’s Survive Style 5+ had been directed by the deranged minds behind the Sushi Typhoon splatter films with a view to mixing Weird Science, Battles Without Honor and Humanity, and The Terminator into 65 concentrated minutes of weirdness.